Thrive on business uncertainty

As the business environment becomes ever more volatile and uncertain, organisations need to take decisions faster, closer to the action and to factor-in more variables. Sometimes the entire future of a company can rest on its response to disruptive force - be it market disruption by a new player (such as Uber, AirBNB), market price volatility (oil price) or political uncertainty (terrorism, Brexit).

So decision making today has to deal with more complexity and volatility (something experience can help with), but at the same time must now be faster and more decentralised (where the knowledge in the heads of experienced staff becomes a bottleneck).

Scale using your "Secret Sauce"

You and your senior staff have built up a wealth of experience and knowledge over the years which sets you apart from your competitors - let's call it your "Secret Sauce". But as the pace and scale of decision-making increases this core asset becomes far harder to deploy consistently, since it is mostly in the heads of your senior staff. If the quality of decision-making falls growth can falter.

Analytics is a tool for making your “secret sauce” more valuable by underpinning it with real-world measurement and predictive capability. We make this value scalable so that every decision in the organisation is based on the same rationale, not just those made personally by your experienced executives - eliminating a key bottleneck. By "codifying" this expertise and embedding it into automated processes and analyses - we help your organisation become truly “Insight-Driven”.

Where could analytics take your business?

Are you "Graduating from Excel" or "Successfully using Analytics"? Or perhaps "Can't see what the fuss is about"? Whatever stage you've reached and whatever sector you operate in - as a Business Leader you'll want to know how analytics will affect your competitiveness.

Like most business leaders, you probably did not grow up with data analytics (even if your staff did). But the 15x return on investment and 26% average productivity improvements that analytics have delivered are too compelling for “do nothing” to be an option.

Who we've worked with

Whether you are already on the journey, taking your first steps or still charting your course...​You need independent, business-savvy experts to navigate the Big Data jungle

WHAT KEEPSBUSINESS LEADERSAWAKE AT NIGHT...

Monetising our existing data - where do we start?

Most companies accumulate masses of data that – once restructured and anonymised – could be of value to others, often for completely different purposes. Examples include location data from mobile phone users that can be used as a proxy for flows of people (of high value to retail, travel and outdoor advertising firms), or financial services company data that – stripped of confidential material – can be reused in aggregated form as demographic data.

Revenue goes directly to the bottom line, but few companies know where to start.

Acquisition or merger done - now what about the data?

You’ve completed your acquisition or merger and the adrenaline is now subsiding. Your due diligence set high expectations for the synergy between the two businesses. But when you look more closely they have completely different management reporting processes. Look further and the core IT systems are different and unlikely to talk to each other. Taking advantage of each other’s customer bases looks difficult because of the different CRM systems they use.

Perhaps now is a good time to look at the data more holistically.

Corporate Performance & "Marginal Gains"

“If you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by one percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,” Sir Dave Brailsford explaining the marginal gains philosophy that is perhaps his greatest British Cycling legacy. In the 11 years that Brailsford headed-up the Team, it became the most successful in any sport at a world and Olympic level.

If this approach can have such dramatic results in sport, what could it do for businesses? And where does big data play a role - you can’t achieve marginal gains of 1% if you don’t have the ability to capture even smaller performance changes.

Digital Transformation - how can Big Data help?

Is your organisation in the middle of a “Business Transformation” or “Digital Transformation” project? Often rooted in traditional IT-led project management, the original objectives of these multi-year endeavours have often been overtaken by recent business or technology developments.

Technology and social behaviour are rapidly intermingling to offer ever better ways to understand and engage with customers, suppliers and employees, as well as to reduce costs and improve productivity - even the most technology-averse enterprises.

The key to taking advantage of this convergence (analytics, mobile, cloud and social media) is Big Data, but doing so requires a break with traditional project management structures – substituting a more agile, continuous improvement approach that puts business users front and centre, not technology.

Insight is great - but how can it be made more actionable?

Step one: review how you’re organised. If you have lots of people with “Insight” in their job title it’s hardly surprising if that’s the limit of their activity. Step two: make sure that the goals reflect the continuous improvement approach that analytics is best at. And while there may be some goals on identifying new cause and effect relationships – most should be about how this improved understanding is translated into improved outcomes.

Think of insight more as “the fuel that drives action” – it’s then only a small step to selecting the action most likely to produce the desired outcome. This is why it’s so important to have insight and tools that can be understood by business people - rather than needing specialists – since they are the ones with the outcome goals. Lastly - once the desired responses are identified - make them as automated as possible.

Analytics enables the disruption of entire industries...

UBER,THE WORLD’S LARGEST TAXI COMPANY,OWNS NO VEHICLES...FACEBOOK,THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR MEDIA OWNER,CREATES NO CONTENT...AIRBNB,THE WORLD’S LARGEST ACCOMMODATION PROVIDER,OWNS NO REAL ESTATE...​...'SOMETHING INTERESTING IS HAPPENING' - Tom GoodwinClick here to see how other industries are being affected

How leading companies are using analyticsSelect industry using buttons below and click logos to see use cases